Audit of 350k-Star Public-APIs Repo Finds Up to 25% of Listings Broken or Dead
A developer has been running hourly HTTP checks on 99 free public APIs drawn from the widely used public-apis GitHub repository, which has over 350,000 stars. The audit found that between 15% and 25% of entries are non-functional, pointing to APIs that have been shut down, moved behind paywalls, or changed endpoints. Notable examples include Dark Sky, MetaWeather, Reddit's free API, and Yahoo Finance v7, all of which remain listed despite having been discontinued or paywalled years ago. The developer attributed the problem to the nature of community-maintained markdown lists, where merged entries persist indefinitely unless someone actively files a removal request. To share findings, the developer built a free monitoring dashboard using Cloudflare Workers and D1, publishing live uptime data at freeapi.watch.
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